Caleb Dean Rutledge

You are standing in a kitchen in Pittsburgh, and the coffee you made is going cold on the sill. You have been Samir Haddad Khoury for less than a minute. His knees already ache on the linoleum. His chin has a cleft you keep finding with your thumb. He is fifty-three and five-foot-five and the whole of him is built like a fence post, hard and short and useful, and somewhere out past the window a field he was supposed to see to is waiting for him in the late-morning light. None of it is wrong. That is the trouble. You stood in his boots and could not think of one thing you wanted, and the wheel is a want that never closes. So you open the page. The wheel turns, a long clicking blur of faces, and your thumb comes down.

Fluorescent light. A long hallway, and the wet shine of the floor running away from you.

You are mid-stride, one hand high on a mop handle, the other loose at your side. Your weight is on the left foot. Water is darkening the tile ahead of the mop head, which is leaving a wide gray arc. The rhythm you inherited breaks for half a second: the mop goes wrong, drags, bunches. You draw it back and do it again, slowly, correctly. Then ten strokes after it, each one checked, on a job that has not needed checking in years.

The handle is cool aluminum, and the grip is worn smooth where a palm has gone over it ten thousand times. Your hand knows it before you do.

Then the memories come, through the things you touch. The shirt first, the cotton gone soft and stiff at once, a gray work shirt with a faint chemical sweetness in the weave. It gives you the morning in his hands: the sleeves rolled twice, left and then right, the button at the throat left open because it chokes him, the belt pulled to the third hole. The keys on his hip clink as you shift, and with the clink comes a door, a hundred doors, the particular wrongness of a lock that sticks in the east stairwell, and the way he leans a shoulder in to ease it. He is twenty-one. He has done this since he was nineteen.

There is gum in your mouth. You didn't put it there. Your jaw is already working it, mint gone flat, and the habit is so deep that when you try to stop, something in the back of your head protests like a hand slapped from a rail. Under it is the dry, scraped feeling in your chest, a pack a day, and a craving that begins as a faint itch behind the sternum and tells you exactly where the pack is: left breast pocket, under the flap.

The tattoo pulls when you flex your forearm. You don't look yet. The handle gives you the shop instead: a bad winter, a cheap afternoon, a needle's hum against the bone, and the pride of having paid for it himself. Bold lines, color that is already softening. A girl's name was almost chosen and wasn't. She comes anyway, the ex, laughing in a car with the heater ticking, the smell of her shampoo, and an ache that is only a bruise now, pressed and then let go.

Under your shoes the floor is slick. In the windows past the lockers, the dark has just begun to thin, and a red sign burns in the wet street beyond the glass. Nobody is in the building. His body knows this and relaxes into it, the one hour when the school belongs to him. His feet hurt. His back is young and does not mind. His beard itches where it hasn't filled in, patchy along the jaw, and your free hand wants to scratch it.

You lift that hand. Turn it over. The knuckles are chapped, the nails clean, the skin faintly pink from the water, and the ink runs up the inside of the forearm, an old bright thing gone to ghost.

You lift your eyes.

"Huh," you say, in his voice, quiet in the long hall. "Look at that."

The mop drips. The gum goes on working. Somewhere behind your ribs the wanting is asleep, and you do not know for how long.